The letter would appear the following year in The Brownies’ Book, a new monthly magazine for Black children. I hope I haven’t made you tired, so no more from your friend. My mother says you will explain all this to me in your magazine and will tell me where to learn how to draw a house, for that is what I certainly mean to do. But one day, down on Broad Street, I was watching some men building houses and I said to a boy there, “When I grow up, I am going to draw a lot of houses like that and have men build them.” The boy was a white boy, and he looked at me and laughed and said, “Colored boys don’t draw houses.” I think I’d like to plan houses for men to build.
I don’t want to be a doctor, or anything like that. So I am writing to ask you if you will please put in your paper some of the things which colored boys can work at when they grow up.
My mother says you are going to have a magazine about colored boys and girls, and I am very glad.
